A robot wrote the 'perfect' horror film — and could save the movie industry

A
still from the horror movie "Suspiria," which was written by a
human.Produzioni Atlas
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Robots are smart enough to write now, which means it's only a
matter of time before I'll lose my job. But for now, I might soon
be able to enjoy "Impossible Things," the first feature-length
movie written with artificial intelligence.

With some help by the humans who made the AI, it wrote
"Impossible Things,"
a horror movie about a family who moves to the middle of
nowhere and start hearing creepy things around the house. The
trailer gives a pretty good idea of the tone.

Now that they have a screenplay and a trailer, Greenlight
Essentials wants to make a full-blown movie. They started
a Kickstarter campaign to raise the $22,843 more they need.

The greater promise of the AI behind "Impossible Things" is that
it'll save the movie industry.

Greenlight Essentials says the AI can look at screenplays
and, based on the box office results of other movies, figure out
if that screenplay will be profitable if its filmed as
a movie.

According to the company, 87% of films in the box office
fail to break even, a claim I couldn't corroborate anywhere. Jack
Zhang, the founder and CEO of Greenlight Essentials, told
INSIDER he got to it by comparing the production budget and
box office revenue of films. However, studios tend to obscure the
profits for individual films beyond just box office performance.
They generate revenue by selling films to international
distributors, by putting them on video-on-demand services like
Netflix, by selling them on DVD, and with various merchandising
opportunities.

Zhang, to his credit, takes the destruction of Relativity very
seriously.
He wrote a post explaining the problems with how they ran
their models and draws a distinction between them and
Greenlight's artificial intelligence software: "All models are
wrong, but some are useful, and that is the logic behind
Greenlight Essentials’ software: to be useful. We do not make any
assumptions to build models or simulate risks; rather, we only
use real-world real data points to draw real conclusions."

Those conclusions mean taking fewer risks. The trailer for
"Impossible Things" doesn't look like anything we haven't seen
before. If the AI is able to write new screenplays based on data
from successful movies, then the movies it writes will look like
ones that already exist.

The real use for the AI will be for independent filmmakers.

Indie filmmakers don't have teams of data analysts at their
disposal to figure out if a movie will make money, like big
studios do. For a big studio, using this system just makes an
already risk-averse company even more risk-averse.

For an independent project, having a computer program you can buy
to help out changes the game. Plus, it'll actually help you write
your movie instead of just telling you what works and what
doesn't.

Most of the Kickstarter rewards for "Impossible Things" are the
usual — DVDs, T-shirts, posters — but once you donate about $800,
you'll get six months of access to the AI software that made
"Impossible Things." Then you can have it make your own
screenplay.